


the neglected feathers of the flightless blackbird

by poppytears



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abusive Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Angst and Porn, Dissociation, Gay Sex, Heavy Angst, Hook-Up, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Masturbation, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, One Shot, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, References to Depression, Sex, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:21:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23189887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poppytears/pseuds/poppytears
Summary: dave tries to shed the melancholy of his thirteen-year-old self almost six years later.
Relationships: John Egbert/Dave Strider
Comments: 4
Kudos: 46





	the neglected feathers of the flightless blackbird

The rain, relentless against the windowpane, threatens to flood the city. Houston has been drowning for the last several days and by this point you’re all just waiting for the evacuation warnings. Except for you and your bro, though. You’ve never left the city, and, well, your bro’s movements are anyone’s guess, so the two of you are fated to wait out everything that nature throws at you, shut up in the apartment. Unmovable and unflinching. That’s just the way Striders are.

The storm has made the city perpetually dark. Your room is no different. The gloom is heavy and silent, and the only light pulses faint and blue from your desktop computer. You’ve taken off your shades at the risk of looking criminally uncool, but straining your eyes in this darkness and having to get prescriptions would be even worse, so you suck it up.

You don’t really have a lot to do. Most of your afternoon has had you sitting here and staring out the window or at the wall, your thoughts made lethargic by the unbroken greyness. You smoked a bowl as soon as you woke up – you just weren’t in the mood for being mentally present today – but you stopped feeling it about an hour ago and now you aren’t sure what to do with yourself. You guess you could just go back to sleep, but there's a dull and anxious need in the back of your mind to be productive. You do not know how to obey it. So you stay at your desk, eyes unfocused, watching raindrops make their way violently across the glass of the window.

The desktop alerts you to a message on one of your chat channels. You fight your way out of your own dull inertia and turn back to the screen, half hoping for something to snap you out of this stagnation and half irritated at being disturbed in the first place. And then you get distracted, which isn’t hard for you to do.

The Pesterchum icon is still pinned to your desktop. God, you’ve barely used that in, what, three years? You guess you’ve never really felt like getting rid of it, or just never fully noticed it was still there once you stopped using it. If you were really digging deep into yourself, then you would realize it’s been sentimental and nostalgic value that made you keep Pesterchum. You made the closest friends of your life on there. That’s over now, though.

You don’t want to think about it. Even best friends drift apart with time, and that’s just the way life is. You had different interests. You grew distant and moved on. Everyone knows that the friends you had at thirteen are never meant to last. Yours didn’t, anyways.

You feel like you’ve barely changed since you were thirteen. You waded through your teenage years in a tired, stoned daze, and there was no real room for growing up because all you did was force yourself from one day to the next. You poured every last bit of your energy into the effort of staying alive for a week, and then you started all over again the next. And you somehow kept it up for five and a half goddamn years. Suddenly you’re almost nineteen, and you have nothing to show for it except for a dark, empty room and three best friends in the form of an abandoned instant message client.

Self-pity is so irredeemably ugly.

* * *

You were freshly eighteen and already standing outside some guy’s door, telling yourself not to lose your nerve. Backing out would have been sickeningly lame of you, and even if your bro would never know, you would remember it as a failure for the rest of your worn-out life. You weren’t sure whether you were a virgin or not. Feels like you had always known what sex was, and you still aren’t clear on where the theory ended and the practice had begun. You think you’ve definitely been touched before. At least, you’ve been watched. But you aren’t hung up about it or anything.

He lived in your building. Five floors down, if you’re remembering right. You’re thinking that maybe he’s moved or something since then, because his location on the hookup app has changed, and you haven’t seen him around. You don’t recall how old he was. Maybe twenty-three. Doesn’t matter. Most of it is a hazy, half-forgotten memory at this point, but you thought it was pretty good, even though it might have just been because you were high.

You sat on his couch and shared a couple joints with him and let him kiss your neck, then take off your shirt, then kiss your chest - your skin burned where his mouth and hands touched you and your mind reeled from it. Eventually you staggered into his bedroom; by the time you fell onto his bed, ecstatic and wasted, you had managed to get out of your jeans and throw them off into some distant, forgettable corner. You heard a condom wrapper ripping open in the spinning ether above you and quietly, briefly, asked why you were here, and oh God what is it that you’re doing to yourself, and then his hand was on your dick and you felt him inside you and you gasped sharply, eyes rolled back, body bursting open. You became undone on his bed and then once you were finished, you left. You went back upstairs to your apartment and closed the door of your room and sat on the edge of your bed in silence.

You knew going into it that you would feel wrong and upset once it was over and you promised that you wouldn’t make it a big deal out of it, but you were just coming down from your high, and you can’t make anything easy for yourself. That’s not your fault. That’s just the way Striders are.

You wanted to think you knew yourself better than you did when you were thirteen. You wanted to think that maybe, now that you’ve grown up a bit, you could stop caring so much about criticizing every single excruciating facet of your being. You didn’t properly understand that you were gay back when you were a kid, but you knew you were _something_ , and it was enough to make you sick of yourself. So fucking sick. You thought you were broken, or whatever it is you came up with, and you wouldn’t be yourself again until you beat it to bloody death and shoved it far back enough into the dark, writhing depths of your psyche that it would disappear completely.

Back then, sitting in your room and feeling hollow and emptied out, your terrified and angry childhood moved restlessly into the reopening rift. You’d let a man touch you, and kiss you, and push you down into his clean white sheets and fuck you until you couldn’t think, and now you couldn’t go back or stop feeling his hands on your thighs. Now you knew that no matter what you tried to do, you wouldn’t be able to get rid of it. You wanted to double over and scream at the idea of spending the rest of your life like this. You wanted to throw something fragile against the wall and let it shatter into a million tiny, sharp pieces so you wouldn’t have to.

Eighteen years old, just having gotten back from your first real hookup, listless and out of it, you thought about John. You thought so shamefully and deeply about John. You wondered what he would say if you were to tell him about this.

Jesus fucking Christ. Now it’s been almost a year since then, and you’re still staring unblinking at his unresponsive offline status.

You think you still might be a little bit in love with him, which you hate yourself for. You never meant to like him so much. You were desperate for any attention you could get your stupid, repressed little hands on, and John offered it to you wholeheartedly. And he was so nice and patient. There was nothing you could do. The circumstances of your childhood forced you head-over-heels.

You would dream about him and wake up feeling guilty. You would bother him till he came online and responded, and if you went more than a couple of days without hearing from him, you would get wildly, inexplicably upset. The pictures of himself that he sent you made you breathless. You thought about kissing him, and kissing him again, and having him in your room, and holding hands with him, and making out with him, and having him sleep next to you. God, you were in so fucking deep.

When your bro showed you porn, you imagined John. You wanted your best friend. Everything about him, you wanted. You never told anyone. Not even your bro knew, and he knew every inch of you.

Then eventually you sort of just, you know. Fell apart. You’re fine with that. You’re cool with it. Maybe it was even for the best. He would have been revolted if he had ever found out. Now the revulsion is yours to carry alone. That’s just the way Striders are.

You shut down the monitor. Your room is plunged into the rainy gloom. In your desk chair, you tilt your head all the way back, close your eyes, and exhale. You have a rising pressure in the far bottom of your stomach and an ache to be touched. It’s too rainy to go outside, and besides, you don't really want to drag yourself through the awkward and mortifying tribulations of finding a hook-up. You breathe out again, a little heavier, and open your legs. You run a hand up your thigh. You think fleetingly about John.

You’re not really into doing this at your desk like some sort of sixteen-year-old, so you get up, pull off your jeans and boxers, toss them towards the closet. You crash on the bed and roll onto your back. The second you put up your knees and open your legs, you’re gone. The evaporating sensation of the high you were riding this morning is just enough to make you suddenly, stupidly horny, and the world narrows to the feeling of your hand on your dick. Your hips jerk up to meet your hand, and you gasp at the sudden jolt of pleasure, and yeah, God, that’s good, so you do it again and your head falls back against the mattress. You arch your back and roll your hips into your hand; the friction is instant euphoria. Your hand moves a little faster and your eyes flutter shut – you feel slick and erotic and pulsing hot, and you moan quietly out into your dark room. The sound is swallowed by the beating rain, but it still feels desperate and dirty. Oh, yes. Fuck. Oh, this is nice.

You feel guilty but you allow your burning, breathless thoughts to return to John. You wonder how he spent his nineteenth birthday, then you think about him in bed, shirtless, straddling a pillow or something, fucking it hard, oh my God yes, his face the picture of ecstasy. And you think about being underneath him, and you jerk off faster.

Then you hear a very subtle, gentle whirring noise in the corner of your room, like the lens of a camera being adjusted. This is nothing unusual. You go out, a new one appears somewhere in your room. You never find it until you hear it, and by that time it’s too late. Your bro is watching you somewhere. He’s always been watching you. Does it matter the way that he does it? It’s not that big a deal.

Eventually, a couple years ago, you realized that he might not be doing it for himself. Sometimes his friends look at you like they know how badly you want to be devoured. Maybe it’s for them. Or you’re the star of some obscene, seedy porn site, and your bro is making some mad cash off your stoned, feverish jack-off sessions. You convinced yourself it was perfectly normal a long time ago, and now you just wonder who’s getting off to you this time.

You thrust up into your hand over and over. The wetness in your palm is driving you crazy. You rub your thumb over the very tip of your dick and the pleasure courses hot through your body, and your whole existence is made up of the filthy, carnal need to cum and the movement of your dick in your hand. You don’t care anymore to keep yourself quiet – you can hear your own pornographic noises over the rain outside. Your mind races, and your eyes roll back, and John’s hips and his hands are all over you, you’re telling him to fuck you, oh God, please, oh John, faster.

Your body explodes into sheer, mind-numbing bliss. Your hips move erratically, desperate for your hand’s friction, and you can’t even think. You’re overwhelmed by ecstasy. There’s no room in you for anything else, so your legs shake blindly and your head is thrown back and you’re coming completely undone. You’re unravelling all over your mattress, and oh it feels so impossibly good, and the sounds you make are straight out of the porn that your bro sends you, high-pitched _oh God yes oh yes fuck ah_ and heavy breathing, the hottest X-rated TV show you’ve ever seen, every guy you’ve ever had phone sex with. You’ve ascended.

Eventually it comes to an end and you can’t do anything but lie there, feeling limp and drunk on it, sticky and wet and smelling like sex. Your body shudders as you rub yourself a couple of final times before giving it up. Jesus, that was fucking insane. Shit. You think about maybe dragging yourself into the shower after a couple minutes of blissed-out lethargy. You hear the hidden camera retract its lens.

The rain is letting up outside. Your heart stops racing.

Your gaze travels lazily around your room. All this shit in here, you’ve had for years. Nothing’s changed since you were thirteen. You aren’t sure whether you’re keeping things because you really want to, or if you’re trying in vain to hold onto a part of yourself that you can’t get back. When you reflect on your life like this, you become increasingly aware that time plows doggedly forward whether you want it to or not.

Maybe your problem is that you just won’t let yourself move on. You could name a couple things you’ve been refusing to get over. But then again, that’s just how Striders are.

A thin ray of sunlight pierces the gloom of your room for the first time in days. You guess Houston won’t have to evacuate after all. It falls flat across the polaroids hanging from the string, your threadbare rug, your bare stomach. You think this could be art.

A crow caws from outside, and you abandon the idea of showering with aloof dignity. Instead, you close your eyes and go back to sleep.

You dream of black, desperate wings, then nothing at all. 


End file.
